Stultitia Delenda Est

“Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through a Presbyterian Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life, for once he slips he is ready for anything.” -H. L. Mencken, “A Good Man Gone Wrong”, as reprinted in A Mencken Chrestomathy

As someone who is neither a Reactionary nor a Progressive, I found this article an engaging, well-crafted overview of Reactionary philosophy. I strongly recommend that you read and, whilst reading it, keep in mind that the author is not a Reactionary. This author gives an exceptionally even-handed and well-crafted overview of Reactionary philosophy while not, himself, subscribing to it.

I think that the core of all philosophy and, indeed, of all human knowledge, is intellectual humility. I think that a corollary to this is that you should always be able to both fairly describe the best arguments against your own position and give an intellectually honest accounting of positions with which you disagree. The article linked about is the finest example of the latter endeavor that I have read in years. I strongly recommend you read it.

1 For terminology, vis. The idea, as pointed out by Caplan, is much older.

The article mentioned in the video above made the rounds of most of the popular gun blogs a month or so ago when it was written, so any firearms enthusiasts in the audience will probably have already read it. If you haven’t, though, I highly recommend you do.

I tend to stay out of online firearms debates for the intellectually selfish reason that they got boring for me a some time ago. This is because everyone arguing on the Internet is, as a rule, already as informed as they are going to permit themselves to be. At this point, arguing about guns on the Internet can only ever aspire to a frustrated argument about priors, and that’s the extremely unusual best case.

But I think that, wherever you fall on the gun debate, you can watch the video above and marvel at the stunning ignorance of the people attempting to ban “assault-style weapons”. And while I’m absolutely okay with people on the Internet not knowing what a barrel shroud is, to see our government servants trying to outlaw them out of pure ignorance is maddening.

But what’s particularly crazy-making is that this kind of ignorance isn’t the exception, but rather the rule in modern American governance. I would be willing to bet that of all the people involved with writing the currently proposed assault weapon ban, not a single one of them could accurately describe all of the features that it proscribes. No matter how you feel about the substance of the current law, that regulations are drafted under such ignorant conditions should make you sore afraid.

Because let’s face it, the second amendment may not be an issue you care about one way or the other, but even the most apolitical among us has something we care deeply about that the government is trying to regulate. And the ignorance at work in crafting this horrid ban on “assault weapons” isn’t limited to firearms issues. The same levels of ignorance are at play screwing up the regulatory regime around whatever issue it is you do care about, whether it’s educational policy, abortion rights, immigration reform, etc. etc. etc.

So why is this ignorance able to persist? Because most people only see it when exposed to it in the context of their own area of expertise or passion. If you know about firearms, you can look at the AWB and see it for the ignorant pandering that it is. But when the same people suggest an immigration reform bill that flatters your priors, suddenly you just assume that they know what they’re talking about.

Or, to use a more current example: I have a lot of friends in the tech industry who, being fairly typical, garden-variety American liberals, are completely in favor of an Assault Weapons Ban. It seems sensible and common-sensical to them, and they have a hard time understanding how anyone can disagree with them. As such, the proposed legislation seems on-point, well-crafted, and long overdue.

Of course the punch line is that all topical regulation is equally bad, it’s just bad in domain-specific ways that only the informed will see or care about.

This phenomenon isn’t novel or limited to government. The name for this effect is “Gell-Mann Amnesia”, named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and first articulated (as near as I can tell) by author Michael Crichton in his 2002 essay “Why Speculate?”. (Note: I can’t seem to find a copy of the original essay online any longer. If anyone does track down a copy, please drop me a link to it either by comment or by email.) Crichton pointed out that he and Gell-Mann often marveled at the stupidity of newspaper articles about the areas of their expertise. Such articles were often so wrong and confused as to completely reverse causal relationships (“wet streets cause rain” in Crichton’s words) or to be so muddled as to be completely non-sensical to someone in the know. Both men would then turn to an article outside their domain knowledge and read on in happy credulity.

In the context of newspapers, Gell-Mann Amnesia might lead to a bad broadsheet surviving a few months longer than it otherwise would. In the context of modern panarchic democracy, Gell-Mann Amnesia leads bad laws, curtailed freedoms, and a regulatory regime in which good people become felons because they own politically incorrect sheet metal or twiddle the wrong bits on their phone.

The great Arnold Kling has an excellent post up outlining one productive way to argue with Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians. Excerpt:

I wish that people would begin political conversations by conceding that the generic way that their opponents view the world is sometimes correct. Start by saying, “It is sometimes appropriate…”

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

Kling’s argument that political ideologies argue from different axes flatters my priors, of course. I am a big fan of Charles Taylor, Jonathan Haidt, etc. Taylor and Haidt’s arguments (about hypergoods and moral foundations, respectively) both describe these kinds of differences pretty well.

So Kling’s premise isn’t exactly new, but where his post excels, I think, is his practical advise for discussing politics partisans of the three camps he identifies. Starting our arguments by conceding the instances in which a person’s model of politics is clearly correct is one way of productively structuring an argument to discover the limits of that particular world view for the topic at hand.

Via Peter Hitchens I stumbled across this heart-wrenching essay from Decca Aitkenhead. It’s a touching story of trying to cope with the loss of her mother, and the ways in which our best intentions can go awry. But the passage that touched me the most was the following:

This new way of looking at life was made easier to adopt by the fact that I was finding it increasingly difficult to remember my mother. When anyone dies, the bereaved take comfort in a degree of posthumous deification. When someone dies young, the revisionism can get completely out of hand. In no time at all, the woman grown-ups described when remembering my mother had turned into a total stranger – a fairytale creature of mythical virtue. Old women would stop me in the village shop, and grip my hand. “Your mother – your mother was an angel.”

The deification, rather like a video recorder, taped over my own memories until they were all gone, and replaced them with a technicolour memorial to somebody else altogether. I could hardly miss someone I didn’t even know, so it became increasingly implausible to consider myself bereaved. If I found myself feeling inexplicably sad, I would think about their loss, and feel terribly sympathetic.

Memory is a singularly tricky and deceptive phenomenon. Our memories feel so solid most of the time. Memory can convince us of “facts” that are false and recall for us in intricate detail events that never actually occurred. Our memories are eager and skillful liars.

And to be honest, that’s not a problem most of the time. Our memories are “truthy” enough to get by. They maintain sufficient accuracy for us to recall the truly important functional details that help us survive day to day. But the fact remains that our memories can’t really be trusted.

OR An Attempt at an Explicitly Non-Libertarian Argument for Marijuana Legalization

On my bus ride home a few days ago, a young man sitting near me was rolling a sizeable blunt on the back of his skateboard. The bus was crowded, everyone could see and smell that he was rolling weed, but of course no one said anything and most people didn’t even look twice. Despite having a huge captive audience for his crime, the man made no attempt to hide his activities. He didn’t seem furtive or ashamed, and certainly didn’t seem worried that anyone would alert the constabulary.

I think that ignored laws are dangerous things. And that the habit of legal disobedience has a generally corrosive social effect. For one thing, laws that are generally, but not always, ignored foster an air of capriciousness under which any citizen might be arrested for what is commonly accepted to be permissible behavior. This leads to situations in which, e.g., black men are arrested at much higher rates for marijuana use, despite using at roughly the same rate as white men. The laws regarding using marijuana are generally ignored and the police are free enforce the laws on disfavored people or groups or to use the law as a way of crushing dissent.

Ayn Rand was hitting on something true when she said:

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

A government that criminalizes or maintains laws against socially permissible behavior is reserving itself the right to punish people arbitrarily. It can cover itself with the figleaf of “our drug dog alerted”, when the arrest was really a naked abuse of power.

There’s another important aspect to this, though. Aside from handing the government undue power, ignored laws foster mistrust in the people which in turn corrodes the rule of law. This mistrust is due not only to the specter of arrest hanging over citizens for engaging in what they consider quotidian behavior, but also because it signals that the legal system itself cannot be trusted. After all, if The Man is lying to you about weed being evil, what else might He lying to you about.

This leads people break other laws which may have real victims and to try and avoid contact with the legal system which ostensibly exists to protect them. Living without a legal system which reliably protects one’s rights can be pretty hellish. Reliable governance and a lack of corruption, after all, is the single biggest difference between safe, prosperous countries and third-world hellholes.

Aristotle, in his Politics said that “the law has no power to command obedience except that of habit, which can only be given by time.” This habit of legal obedience is one of the many factors of good governance and there’s no surer way to break people of that habit than outlaw that which is generally accepted as being socially permissible. Once this habit breaks down, it serves as both an indicator that the law is debased and corrupt and also as an impediment to fixing the state and returning to some semblance of good governance.

Once the people mistrust the state to provide them with effective protections and sensible laws, they tend to stop trusting that the institutions can be reformed. This leads to cultural cynicism, which further fosters an acceptance and even expectation of corruption and graft (which I think is best evidenced by crony client states like Greece or some of the South American Republics). This begins to describe a negative feedback loop in which legal corruption fosters cynicism which in turn tolerates further corruption.

So what I really saw on the bus this evening was a small sign of social decline. Not because of the marijuana, but because a bus-load of presumably upstanding citizens witnessed a man break the law and didn’t even bat an eyelash. This doesn’t reflect poorly on the observers, but on the law. When the state outlaws that which civil society accepts, it aligns itself against society rather than with it and the resulting conflict can only serve to damage both institutions.

Peter Risdon has an excellent post from a few years back about poverty, ownership, and self reliance. It’s a great post and it does an excellent job of highlighting a fact that a lot of people miss, which is that modern poverty is primarily caused by bad memes.1 Some of these memes are personal mental traits, some are social or group traits, but ultimately it is these dysfunctional ideas that are at the root of almost all poverty in Western countries. Which memes they are specifically (and I have my personal theory) is an important debate, but outside the scope of this post. It doesn’t matter what the bad memes are exactly, the fact is that poverty as we know it today will not change until those memes get replaced by better ones.

A natural consequence of this fact is that redistribution of wealth is not a solution to poverty. Taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor does not fix poverty any more than ingesting aspirin fixes a cold. It relieves some of the symptoms, and so it may be desirable in the short term, but it’s not going to resolve the underlying problem. In addition, as Risdon points out in his essay, redistributive welfare may actually foster bad memes. Implemented poorly, welfare encourages bad memes to go unresolved, to spread, or to get worse.2

Until we as a society start working to eliminate (through education and welfare reform) the bad ideas that keep people in poverty, we’re never going to appreciably reduce the suffering caused by poverty in America and the rest of the industrialized world. Again, whether you personally believe that the bad memes causing poverty are fundamentally personal (e.g. lack of future orientation or entitlement culture) or social (e.g. endemic greed, lack of charity, or interpersonal alienation) doesn’t really matter. The memes are the issue and wealth transfers won’t change those bad ideas one bit. Per Risdon, though, poorly-implemented welfare may actually worsen them, meaning that redistributive welfare might end up being not the cure for poverty, but the cause of it.

1 Two caveats to this post are that I’m not talking about poverty due to disability or mental illness, which are clearly not caused by bad memes. Also that poverty is relative and that poverty in the modern Western world is a different beast from poverty a century ago or poverty in the Third World.

2 For more evidence of this, see this CFP post showing that the War on Poverty correlated with the end of poverty numbers declining in America.

I was thinking earlier about some conversations I had while I was TAing a class in grad school on the Philosophy of Technology. We were talking about ethics of genetic engineering and whether or not it was ethical to, for instance, predispose your unborn child to heightened athleticism or intelligence. So I’m interested in the spectrum of possible uses for genetic engineering and which ones people feel are permissible under their ethical intuition.

So, assume that you’re an expectant parent and the doctor tells you that he can cheaply, safely, and with a 100% success rate tweak your child’s genetics. He explains the benefits to you and asks you to decide which genetic alterations (if any) you feel comfortable having performed on your child.

1.) The doctor can detect and fix a host of life-threatening or debilitating genetic diseases and disorders, guaranteeing that your child will not suffer from e. g., Coeliac disease or Haemophilia.

Magic Blue Smoke

House Rules:

1.) Carry out your own dead.
2.) No opium smoking in the elevators.
3.) In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.
4.) A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place.
4a.) Penalty one stroke.
5.) Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.
6.) Keep Calm and Kill It with Fire.
7.) Spammers will be fed to the Crabipede.